First Partner Illustration Collection Charmander pop report: ninety four copies below an 8

Published September 22, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is September 20, 2026

PSA has graded this Charmander 28,435 times and sent back 94 copies below a PSA 8. At the September 20, 2026 pull the First Partner Illustration Collection Charmander pop report reads 24,003 Gem Mint 10s from 28,435 submissions, a 84.4 percent gem rate. No other English card past 20,000 grades is grading anywhere near that well.

The card is six months old. It reached shelves on March 20, 2026, and by September it was outgrading every 1999 holo in the census.

Reading the First Partner Illustration Collection Charmander pop report

Sort the 132 English cards past 20,000 PSA grades and Charmander #038 comes out first by gem rate. Bulbasaur #037 takes second at 79.35 percent and Squirtle #039 fourth at 76.90, both out of the same box. The only outsider in the top four is the Crown Zenith Deoxys VMAX GG45 at 77.48.

Run the same 132 rows by the share landing at a 7 or lower and the order barely changes: Charmander first at 0.33 percent, Squirtle second at 0.48, Bulbasaur third at 0.54. Put both ends together and 4,160 copies stopped at a 9 while 24,003 cleared, so 99.04 percent of everything ever submitted came back as one of the top two grades. Highest in the cohort, and the three rows behind it came out of the same box. PSA added 10,482 more in the last reporting period, up from 10,038 the period before, so the queue is still lengthening.

The failure that never shows up here

A submission can miss two unrelated ways: turn up with a dinged corner and get capped for damage, or turn up clean and still miss the centering tolerance for a 10. Most censuses give up copies both ways. This one has very nearly stopped giving up the first kind.

Set it against the promos that come one per Elite Trainer Box, the nearest thing the hobby has to a control group. Thirty two of them have passed 1,000 grades. Pooled across 630,383 submissions they gem 37.94 percent, send 43.89 percent home at a 9 and lose 5.00 percent at a 7 or lower. The nine First Partner cards, pooled across 137,845, gem 79.25 percent, stop 19.34 percent at a 9 and lose 0.42 percent.

Neither range touches the other. The best Elite Trainer Box gem rate, 61.05 percent, still falls short of the weakest First Partner card at 68.10, and on damage it is 1.14 percent against 0.59.

Age is the obvious objection, and the data kills it. Twenty nine English cards printed in 2026 have passed 5,000 grades, and eight of the eleven cleanest belong to this product. The two Elite Trainer Box promos in that same group sit at the far end: N's Zekrom #031 loses 3.71 percent below an 8, last of all twenty nine, and Tyrunt #070 loses 3.31. Same year, same short window, eleven times the damage.

Why the sealed pack is not the answer

Pokemon's own product page lists the contents as "1 Pokemon TCG pack containing 3 of 9 promo cards", plus two ordinary boosters and a sticker sheet. The promo never sits loose in a tray. It is machine collated, sealed at the factory, and opened by whoever bought the box.

Tempting, and not sufficient. The Greninja Gold Star also travelled sealed in its own promo pack inside a sealed box, and 16.99 percent of its 58,565 submissions came back at a 7 or lower against a 5.22 percent gem rate. The Generations Shaymin EX did worse at 44.02 percent. Sealing a card protects it from collectors. It does nothing about what the press already did.

Hold the packaging story loosely for a second reason too. Two promos from the Ascended Heroes Premium Poster Collection, a different product, lose 0.43 and 0.44 percent below an 8 and sit right among the First Partner rows. Whatever is doing this is not unique to a pack, and PSA publishes no reasons with its grades, so the cause stays open.

Three cards in one pack, three gem rates

The pack does not hand out three random cards from the nine. Pokemon describes them as coming from "the Kanto, Sinnoh, or Alola region", and the census agrees: the nine rows fall into three tight groups whose members were clearly bought together. Kanto has drawn 79,784 grades against Sinnoh's 31,390 and Alola's 26,671.

Inside each group, submission volume is fixed by construction. Nobody grades the Charmander without owning the Bulbasaur and the Squirtle, and the counts bear that out, spanning only 1.12x within Kanto, 1.13x within Sinnoh and 1.20x within Alola. Identical packs, identical owners, identical handling.

The gem rates separate anyway. Kanto runs 84.41, 79.35 and 76.90, a spread of 7.52 points. Sinnoh runs 82.13, 79.82 and 76.41, a spread of 5.73. Alola runs 82.58, 74.40 and 68.10, a spread of 14.48. No pattern by type survives a second look, since the Fire starter finishes first in Kanto and Alola but third in Sinnoh. The pack appears to set the floor. Something on the cards themselves sets the order above it, and nothing published says what.

Saboteri put a toy store behind him

The credit on the card face reads Illus. Saboteri. The setting is a shop aisle: shelves of Charmander plush in pink crates, a gift box, a blue console, and a Pikachu off to the right with a 3 and a 0 across it for the franchise's thirtieth year. Basic, 80 HP, Ember for 30, regulation mark J, copyright 2026.

Pokemon calls these illustration rare style promos, and the art runs to all four edges with no yellow border to absorb a knock. That is the layout collectors usually complain about. It carries the cleanest census in the cohort anyway.

The fee against the ceiling

PriceCharting's tape, read September 22, 2026, puts the raw card at a $38.16 median across 53 filtered sales back to May 11, a titled PSA 9 at $39.50 across 26 sales since August 30, and a PSA 10 at $100.00 across 30 sales that all landed inside four days. Whatever else is true, it sells the moment it is listed.

PSA's Standard tier, checked live on September 22, 2026, costs $59.99 at 90 to 100 business days with $1,000 of insured value, and Value services remain paused. Card plus fee comes to $98.15, leaving $1.85 of daylight against a $100.00 sale before anybody takes a cut. Selling costs more than $1.85. Net of a 15 percent haircut a guaranteed Gem Mint 10 returns $85.00, a $13.15 loss, and weighted by the card's own census it returns $76.89, a $21.26 loss.

Notice what is not causing that. The gap between a guaranteed 10 and the real census outcome is $8.11 a card, because 84.41 percent of them do gem. The gap between that outcome and breaking even is the $59.99 fee, 60 percent of what a PSA 10 sells for. A 9 is worth $1.34 more than a raw copy, so there is no consolation grade either.

The trade would clear at a $16.90 buy price. The cheapest of those 53 recorded sales was $22.00.

So leave it raw. If you opened a Series 1 box this spring, all three cards in that pack are worth more sleeved than slabbed at today's fee, and the other Charmander promo in the data argues the same thing from the opposite end. If you came only for the number, read how a population report is built, then watch the count move in the BetterPop gallery.

Sources

• GemRate PSA population data via the BetterPop dataset, September 20, 2026 pull; cohort ranks, product family pools and triad figures computed across all 110,641 rows on September 22, 2026.
• PriceCharting, Charmander #38 Pokemon Promo, price table and sold tape read September 22, 2026. Sold medians exclude three card lots, non PSA slabs, played copies and one McDonald's Charmander listed on the same page.
• Pokemon.com, First Partner Illustration Collection Series 1 product page, launch date and contents, read September 22, 2026 via the Internet Archive because the live page renders empty.
• PSA, grading service pricing, read September 22, 2026.
• Illustrator credit, HP, attack, regulation mark and copyright line read from the card face of MEP EN 038.